Word: seamen
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Seaman starts out as an egg, which in short order spawns half a dozen fishy mini-seamen that babble at you in baby talk. To keep them alive you have to feed them, make sure they're warm and clean their tank daily (which is dark and dingy and looks like an early David Lynch movie...
...time went by, my little seamen died off one by one, Survivor-style, until only one remained. It grew larger, uglier and more humanoid. Its fins got less finny and more leggy, and its pale, puffy face came to resemble Alfred Hitchcock's. Our conversation got more sophisticated too, although the creature didn't get more affectionate. It greeted me with "yeah, hello, whatever." It called me "fuzzy" and "air sucker." It whined when I didn't keep its tank warm enough--acting as fussy as Niles on Frasier...
When Wilkinson, 55, retired after 22 nomadic years as an Army chaplain, he remembers thinking "the appropriate thing would be to get settled." Then his Episcopal bishop spotted an ad announcing that the Seamen's Church Institute, which has ministered to ocean mariners for 165 years, was expanding to the nation's towboat fleet. Within months, Wilkinson and his colleague Karen Cox were staring at a pastoral fiefdom encompassing the Ohio River, part of the Cumberland and the Mississippi from Greenville, Miss., up to Lock 27 above St. Louis--1,808 miles as the catfish swims...
...ship was the Endurance, a small, tight, Norwegian-built three-master that was intended to take Sir Ernest Shackleton and a small crew of seamen and scientist, 27 men in all, to the southernmost shore of Antarctica's Weddell Sea. From that point Shackleton proposed to force a passage by dogsled across the continent. The trek was intended to surpass the achievement of Shackleton's great rival, Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who had reached the South Pole early in 1912 (narrowly preceded by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen) but had died with his four companions on the march back...
...with any good marine fiction, the sea itself is background, scene shifter and, from time to storm-lashed time, main character. But the series swims also on an ocean of wondrous language, in which inept seamen, for instance, are not only "sad brutish grobians," but "froward dirty disreputable rough good-for-nothing disorderly ragabashes and raparees." If there is a serious flaw, it is that since the novels are mostly about men, they are probably mostly for men. O'Brian writes good female characters, but mostly they remain ashore (and one of the best, Maturin's flamboyant wife Diana, dies...